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An anonymous reader writes "You may know Zotero, a bibliography management application that helps create and organize entire personal libraries, including WebDAV synchronization of attachments (e.g. PDFs). A new project is about to bring us an Android app that will turn any Android device into a personal library with document downloading (complete or on-demand) and synchronization. In combination with a PDF reader, you will have your entire digital library with you in order to read, highlight, and annotate while on the go. A fully functioning web-only prototype (albeit without WebDAV support) is available at http://zoteroreader.com/ Currently, a fund-raising campaign is ongoing to support the developers. Please visit https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/zotero-reader-android-app/ for a pledge."Link to Original Source

Looking at the summary as well as at the webpage it does not become clear how old the mentioned kids are and if the goal is really understanding science and engineering.
For a younger age things like http://www.crazymachinesgame.com/ which give a more playful introduction to physics might be better.
Programming for kids has been addressed multiple times on Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post has a report on the pending trial of internet "shock jock" and white supremacist Hal Turner charged with threatening the lives of three judges on the US Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit after he posted photographs on his blog of the appellate judges and a map showing the Chicago courthouse where they work, noting the placement of "anti-truck bomb barriers" and wrote "Let me be the first to say this plainly: These Judges deserve to be killed." Turner's case is likely to test the limits of political speech at a time when incendiary talk is proliferating on broadcast outlets and the Internet, from the microphones of well-known commentators to the keyboards of anonymous netizens. "He gave an opinion. He did not say go out and kill," says Turner's defense attorney Michael Orozco after unsuccessfully seeking bail. "This is political hyperbole, nothing more." Joseph Persichini Jr., chief of the FBI's Washington field office, says that "law enforcement's challenge every day is to balance the civil liberties of the United States citizen against the need to investigate activities that might lead to criminal conduct. No matter how offensive to some, we are keenly aware expressing views is not a crime and the protection afforded under the Constitution cannot be compromised." First Amendment scholar Martin H. Redish adds that much of what Turner wrote is protected by the Constitution, including his declarations that the judges should be eliminated but says that Turner probably crossed a line when he printed information about the judges, their office locations and the courthouse. "I would give very strong odds on a thousand bucks that once he said that stuff, it takes it out of any kind of hyperbole range.""

An anonymous reader notes a BBC report on research recently published in the journal Current Biology, indicating that cats manipulate humans by adding a baby-like cry to their purring. "Cat owners may have suspected as much, but it seems our feline friends have found a way to manipulate us humans. Researchers at the University of Sussex have discovered that cats use a 'soliciting purr' to overpower their owners and garner attention and food. Unlike regular purring, this sound incorporates a 'cry,' with a similar frequency to a human baby's. The team said cats have 'tapped into' a human bias — producing a sound that humans find very difficult to ignore."

Slashdot.org was unreachable for about 75 minutes this evening. Here is the post-mortem from Sourceforge's chief network engineer Uriah Welcome. "What we had was indeed a DoS, however it was not externally originating. At 8:55 PM EST I received a call saying things were horked, at the same time I had also noticed things were not happy. After fighting with our external management servers to login I finally was able to get in and start looking at traffic. What I saw was a massive amount of traffic going across the core switches; by massive I mean 40 Gbit/sec. After further investigation, I was able to eliminate anything outside our network as the cause, as the incoming ports from Savvis showed very little traffic. So I started poking around on the internal switch ports. While I was doing that I kept having timeouts and problems with the core switches. After looking at the logs on each of the core switches they were complaining about being out of CPU, the error message was actually something to do with multicast. As a precautionary measure I rebooted each core just to make sure it wasn't anything silly. After the cores came back online they instantly went back to 100% fabric CPU usage and started shedding connections again. So slowly I started going through all the switch ports on the cores, trying to isolate where the traffic was originating. The problem was all the cabinet switches were showing 10 Gbit/sec of traffic, making it very hard to isolate. Through the process of elimination I was finally able to isolate the problem down to a pair of switches... After shutting the downlink ports to those switches off, the network recovered and everything came back. I fully believe the switches in that cabinet are still sitting there attempting to send 20Gbit/sec of traffic out trying to do something — I just don't know what yet. Luckily we don't have any machines deployed on [that row in that cabinet] yet so no machines are offline. The network came back up around 10:10 PM EST."

Felix writes "Wireless keyboards and mice are becoming an increasingly common sight on desks. However, wireless hardware carries large hidden risks. Dreamlab Technologies has shown that it is possible to capture and decrypt keystrokes, meaning that user names, passwords, bank details or confidential correspondence can be very easily eavesdropped.
Checkout http://www.dreamlab.net/ for further information."Link to Original Source

An anonymous reader writes "from MicroSofts site "The Infolect® application, which went into production in September 20"......."In the past six years, there have been no production outages at the London Stock Exchange, and the new systems running on Microsoft technologies are critical to maintaining this 100 per cent reliability record."http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=200042

damdam writes "A Dutch guy seems to have set up a small network of bluetooth scanners in his town of Apeldoorn scanning for bluetooth devices. He has all the information logged to a central database and you can search it over the web. On his website it says "Some of these matches were only minutes apart. Therefore I could even calculate the approximate speed of someone moving from one location to another.". There are also some interesting statistics on his site showing traffic volume in his hometown (based on bluetooth signals) and he even lists popularity of certain Nokia phones. It's interesting to see how much information an individual can gather using old equipment.
I just noticed this guy is the same guy as the one running the wired house on Icepick.com. Seems like tracking people is his thing."Link to Original Source

Everyone knows exploring space is dangerous, and the costs are astronomical. Which is why, just last month, NASA was able to squeeze $1 billion extra from the Senate.

That very same day, NASA also posted an online notice few people saw — seeking four-star hotel bids for its December awards,

So NASA is urinating away 4 million of your tax dollars this year, throwing luxurious parties and patting themselves on the back. In December they'll dump $400,000 to $500,000 in Orlando, according to CBS News.

I love space exploration as much as anyone. If they wanted billions to go to Pluto, I'd probably never say a word. But high dollar shindigs? Give me a break. I work with an organization helping to feed the hungry. We get a $30 to $1 return on our transportation budget (and we buy our own gas, use up our own office supplies and take no pay so almost every penny donated goes to transportation) — in other words, Decembers Awards budget (a paltry $28K) would let me put $840,000 worth of food in the warehouse.

So, here's my challenge, Rocket Scientists — Take a pass on the coconut shrimp and send the savings our way. I'm sure we can feed a few thousand families for your sacrifice."

kirouac writes "Security mavens from Kaspersky say they have discovered a nasty virus that came pre-installed on Maxtor external hard drives sold in the Netherlands.
The virus, dubbed Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah, was found on the Maxtor 3200 Personal Storage, according to this press release from Kaspersky (translated from Dutch to English courtesy of FreeTranslation.com).
The company said the virus roots around a computer in search of gaming passwords. The malicious code also rifles through a computer's contents and deletes mp3 files, according to a separate description of the virus, also from Kaspersky.
A spokesman for Seagate, which recently acquired Maxtor, said the company was investigating Kaspersky's findings. "This scenario seems unlikely because the 3200 does not have any software preloaded on the drive so there is not an opportunity for a virus to be loaded," he said. Yes the drive is formatted but I have never heard of a virus that lives in the master boot record.""

An anonymous reader writes "Developer named Master Alex, took LZMA SDK and compiled a set of benchmark using SDK as an algorithm base. Here he put an archive with source and compiled in Delphi, C#, C++ and Java binaries. Results are put here and retested here. See, Java runtime code speed in decompressing under Windows x64 is only 15% slower then that of C++.

So, the question is can you provide an optimized code in Delphi 7 so it achieve the same (+-10%) speed as C++ compiled code? Or is it impossible? It presumed that Delphi binaries are very fast, almost of C++ speed."